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Wednesday, May 25, 2016

Poetry: “On Receiving News of the War” by Isaac Rosenberg

My
poetry read for this year is a collection poems from poets of WWI, titled Some Desperate Glory: The First World War
the Poets Knew, written and edited by Max Egremont. It’s written by Egremont because it’s more
than just a collection of poetry. The
poetry is integrated with the history and poet’s lives. The book is organized around the year by year
history and what the poets were up to in that year, and it provides a sampling
of that year’s poetic output.

For
instance, Isaac Rosenberg is
a poet I had not heard of before. It is
interesting that so many poets and writers served in the First World War, and
unfortunately many did not make it through alive, especially the poets. In the “Prelude,” where we learn about the
biographies of the poets we’ll meet, we learn this about Rosenberg:

Self Portrait

A year later, in June
1914, a young Jewish man also arrived in South Africa. Isaac Rosenberg, like Julian Grenfell, painted and wrote poetry. But Rosenberg came from an atmosphere of
greater intellectual freedom among immigrants in London’s Whitechapel. When Grenfell announced that he thought of
leaving the army to study art in Paris, his family mocked him; this was not
what the eldest son of Lord Desborough did.
Rosenberg may have been proud that ‘Nobody ever told me what to read, or
eveer put poetry in my way,’ but his father, a Jewish pedlar who had fled
Lithuania to escape conscription in the Russian army, was a cultured man. Barnett Rosenberg had trained for the
rabbinate and wrote poetry. Isaac’s
parents were both pacifists.

They were also very
poor. At the age of fourteen, Isaac was
apprenticed to an engraver, which he hated.
He went to evening classes at Birkbeck College, wrote verses influenced
by Swinburne, Rossetti and Francis Thompson, and looked to Keats, Shelley and
an earlier engraver poet, William Blake.
In 1911, rich Jewish patrons paid for him to study at the Slade School
of Fine Art alongside the artists David Bomberg and Christopher Nevinson. Yiddish had been Isaac Rosenberg’s first
language; as late as 1913, wanting to enter for an art prize while at the
Slade, he was unsure if he was a British subject. Like Julian Grenfell, he felt trapped by what
he called ‘the fiendish persistence of the coil of circumstance’. Yet he thought, ‘it is the same with all
people no matter what the condition’.

In
1914, Rosenberg had not entered the war yet, and while in South Africa composed
in this poem his premonitions on hearing of the war.

First,
some basics on the construction of the poem.
It’s composed of five stanzas of quatrains in roughly iambic meter and
an ABAB rhyme scheme with no interlocking rhymes between the stanzas. What’s interesting to me about the lines is
the length. The first and third lines of
each stanza are composed of three feet (which in this case equals six
syllables) and the second and fourth lines of two feet (equaling four syllables). I cannot find in either my poetry composition
books nor on the internet this form. It’s
not that an unusual form. I could swear
I’ve seen it before. I went searching
through various poets who I thought might have used this form—Auden, Tennyson,
Shelley, Christina Rossetti, Hopkins—I couldn’t find anything they wrote that
was in this form. So until I can locate
another such poem in this form, I’m going to have assume Rosenberg is the first
to use it.

You
can read Tennyson’s entire poem at Literature Network, here. The lines of In Memoriam are all four feet, and the rhyme scheme is different
than Rosenberg’s, but the phrasing and compact sentences nearly echo. Both use staccato sentences, both freely use
the connector “and,” and both seem to speak in a pastoral, almost Biblical
voice. Notice too how Rosenberg alludes
to Tennyson’s poem with “No man knows why” in the eighth line of his poem to
Tennyson’s “he knows not why” in the tenth line of his poem,

But
Rosenberg’s shortened second and fourth lines push the poem toward a
ballad. Compare the lines of “Amazing
Grace.”

Amazing grace! How sweet
the sound

That saved a wretch like
me.

I once was lost, but now
am found,

Was blind but now I see.

The
ballad form consists of four feet (eight syllables) in the first and third
lines and three feet (six syllables) in the second and fourth lines. Rosenberg shortens the ballad form by
reducing a foot in each line. On the
other hand Tennyson pushes away from the ballad form by adding a foot to the second
and fourth lines. Though both Rosenberg
and Tennyson are modifying the ballad form differently, I think both are doing
it so for the same overarching reason. They
want the feel of a hymnal song while altering the form to add a different layer
of complexity.

Now
let’s get to the heart of Rosenberg’s poem.
He starts the poem with the image of snow, a symbol of universal death. The snow comes to Cape Town, where he is
writing the poem, having heard of the Great War’s start. He calls Cape Town a “Summerland,” even
though it is snowing. The war began in the
month of July, which in locales below the equator would mean it is winter. Rosenberg is playing with that sort of paradoxical
situation where it snows in what Europeans would call a summer month. The situation is not quite in the norm.

And
then in the third stanza by a parallelism he compares with that unnatural snow “an
old spirit” in men’s hearts that has caused man’s fallen state. That fallen spirit has shed God’s blood, and
God sadly mourns the dead. His last
stanza is a masterpiece:

O! ancient crimson curse!

Corrode, consume.

Give back this universe

Its pristine bloom.

Rosenberg
identifies the spirit that has led to this Great War to original sin, and
appeals in prayer like voice to return to that Edenic state. It’s interesting that a Jewish writer would
use the phrase “God’s blood is shed,” which alludes to Christ crucified. Even the “malign kiss” in the eleventh line
seems to allude to Judas betraying Christ with a kiss. I would think he was conscious of the
allusions. Whatever the case may be, it’s
a fine poem.

Skimming
ahead in Some Desperate Glory I can
find a number of very good Rosenberg poems.
I doubt I’ll have a chance to post another, since I want to give a
variety of poets their due. Sadly Rosenberg
did not survive the war. From his
Wikipedia entry:

On March 21, 1918, the
German Army started its Spring offensive on the Western Front. A week later,
Rosenberg sent his last letter with a poem “Through these Pale Cold Days to
England” before going to the front lines with reinforcements. Having just
finished night patrol, he was killed on the night of the April 1, 1918 with
another 10 KORL's soldiers; there is a dispute as to whether his death occurred
at the hands of a sniper or in close combat. In either case, he died in a town
called Fampoux, north-east of Arras. He was first buried in a mass grave, but
in 1926, the unidentified remains of the six KORL's soldiers were individually
re-interred at Bailleul Road East Cemetery, Plot V, Saint-Laurent-Blangy, Pas
de Calais, France. The Rosenberg's gravestone is marked with his name and the
words, "Buried near this spot", as well as — "Artist and
Poet".

What
a shame. He was only 27 years old. What a great poet he might have developed
into.